AIDS scientists trial lemon juice douche

May 13, 2005

An Australian scientist has launched an international fund to pay for human trials into whether lemon and lime juice douches protect women from sexually-transmitted HIV infection.

Melbourne University's Roger Short has previously shown in the laboratory that lemon juice immobilises sperm and kills the AIDS virus.

But until recently, ethical human trials have remained impossible for fear women could contract HIV if the treatment failed.

Quite by chance, Professor Short said Nigerian doctors had discovered sex workers in the city of Jos were already using intravaginal lime or lemon juice to prevent pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases.

Some had been using the citric douches, either just before or just after sex, for more than a decade, Prof Short said.

"To find a large group of women who are already using this is just mind-blowing and to be scooped by prostitutes is humbling," he said in an interview.

"What we'd love to know is, is it really helping these girls because they don't know their HIV status.

"If it is, then those girls have discovered something of enormous importance to the world of women because we lack a female-controlled HIV prevention method. All we've got is condoms."

Prof Short said he hoped to raise $US100,000 ($A131,000) for a prospective study of 400 Nigerian sex workers to see if the juice douche protected them from HIV infection or whether it made them more susceptible.

"It might damage the vaginal epithelium and we want to know one way or the other," he said.
"Before you can advocate it at all, you must have a clinical trial. It's clearly ethical, in fact highly desirable, to study existing users.

"These girls are suddenly enormously valuable."

The project was dealt a heavy blow recently when US president George W Bush announced HIV/AIDS groups seeking US government funding for work overseas must make a written pledge opposing commercial sex work, or risk losing funding.

Prof Short, who works in Melbourne University's department of obstetrics, said the Bush decision prompted him to set up the Mary Magdalene Fund to raise money for the study.

"Mary Magdalene was a prostitute and was forgiven by Christ which George Bush seems to be unaware of," he said.

"He doesn't seem to be able to forgive them. We shouldn't be condemning sex workers, we should be helping them."

If the citric acid in lemon and lime juice proves to be a natural microbicide, millions of sex workers in the developing world could benefit.

In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, an estimated 28 million people are HIV-positive.

Prof Short said the epidemic was becoming feminised with three times as many women becoming infected in the region as men.

"HIV is predominantly infecting people who are having to live on $1 a day," he said.

"They can't afford anything sophisticated. We've got to find, if we can, something that's cheap enough for women with no disposable income to buy."

Prof Short said that in South Africa, five lemons - with enough juice to theoretically protect women during 50 acts of intercourse - cost about the same as one condom.

He said lemon juice had been around for hundreds of years as a natural contraceptive.

"I've personally spoken to a dozen women in their 80s in London who came up to me after a lecture and they all said they had planned their families on lemon juice," Prof Short said.

"Casanova also advocated it."

The Mary Magdalene Fund was launched this week at the annual scientific meeting of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in Wellington, New Zealand.

- AAP